Introduction: Intro to Tech Strategy

Code does not have independent value#

This is a very high-level overview of tech strategy. It is the business of software rather than the art and science of creating software itself.

It goes without saying that your coding does not have independent value. It must be applied usefully to some economic problem to have a sustainable real-world impact.

Tech strategy and your career#

Perhaps more pertinent to your career, your coding ability will be associated with the success of your company. We infer better ability in someone who was an early engineer at Uber, despite being unaware of their actual contributions, compared to someone at an unknown startup who may have accomplished far more interesting things.

Understand your business#

Even if you don’t care about the business side and never intend to be a founder, your understanding of the business you’re in allows you to offer suggestions and prioritize work in alignment with economic opportunity.

It may not feel like much, but as the person closest to the code, you have a tremendous amount of autonomy to form the final experience delivered:

• You make delivery estimations and warn of serious technical blockers.
• You make technical tradeoffs between the “quick and dirty” way and the “right” way.
• You pick abstractions for scale and pluggability vs. rejecting premature abstraction.
• You evaluate commercial solutions compared to the cost of a custom solution - the infamous “build vs. buy” decision.
• You can defensively code for every probable system failure or understand where failures are more acceptable than their cure.
• You sweat the fine details of accessibility, UI/UX, uptime, and response time because it matters to users.
• You can find the easy-to-implement “low hanging fruit” ideas offered by your data models and pre-existing frameworks (and plugins) and can suggest them to your product owners.

Developers are designers and product managers#

As you advance in autonomy, you will get to pick the projects you work on and even pitch new initiatives that you eventually own (this is a GREAT career move).

If you read the story of how Google Maps’ Satellite view was almost named “Bird Mode” by a CEO decision but was ignored by the product team, you will understand how your broad-ranging powers even go as far as naming products, which is in no developer’s job description. When the chips are down, developers are designers and last resort product managers.

Business judgment#

As you increase in seniority, you will also have to grow in your business judgment. In fact, taking a glance over any Engineering Career Ladder will tell you how important your business impact is to your career advancement.

Technologies you work with#

Finally, the technologies that you work with are also strongly influenced by their economic incentives. “Free and open source” does not mean “free of any commercial considerations.” Nor does it mean “open direction decided by direct democracy.” The platforms you run on, whether it is the browsers, public clouds, databases, payment/fulfillment platforms, or even language distributions, all have massive investments. Well, above ten figures in some cases!